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Contents lists

T. E. Lawrence to B. E. Leeson

14
Barton Street,
Westminster
4.2.23.

Dear Leeson,

One sentence near the beginning of your letter made me shed tears: for
it seems you have written vainly to me in the past: but the next
sentence made me shout with joy, for you announced that now 'with the
assistance of the Press' you had at last definitely located me.

NO
SUCH LUCK! When the Press let itself go in that hideous fashion the Air
Ministry said 'Quite impossible to permit an A.C.2 to have such
publicity.' I was meek and said I didn't really want it: they might have
it if they could get it. In reply they slung me out. Since then I've
been in very low water (did you understand that I enlisted not to write
books, but because I was broke?) and am not yet quite in the deep stuff,
though three Govt. Departments exhaust themselves trying to find me a
billet.... I
turn down all their ideas, and ask for something poorer, and they think
I mean richer. Soon they will burst themselves. You see I'm fed up with
being called Colonel in this ridiculous year 1923: and am determined not
any more to be respectable. Besides I liked being an A.C.2. and would
like to be something of the sort in future: However, they won't have me
back, so that hope is vain.

I
never got any previous letter from you, or don't remember any, though
I'm a bad letter-writer. This present effort of yours came to me via
Trenchard, who seems to be my post-office. He's a very great man, and
has never cursed me for bothering him so horribly. I gather that I
nearly wrecked the Air Force. It was one of the beastly officers who
gave me away. [10 lines about officers in the Arab Revolt omitted]

I
go, when my dress clothes are out of pawn, to the G.H.Q. dinner, with
Allenby and Staff. It's frightfully solemn.

No
news of Williams!

I'm glad you are alive, and hope that it's more than just alive. There
is nothing so repulsive as working merely for a living - only things are
so bad just now that many people are doing that in despair. I refuse to
do it, and have never actually died in consequence: but shall soon if
something doesn't turn up.

You see news in the Press every six months or so (or I do) that my book
on the Arab Revolt is either lost, or just about to be published.
Actually I printed a few copies of it nearly three years ago, and there
it rests. I wrote all my heart out, and so it's rather intimate and
indiscreet. It contains only my adventures, so that a certain car
adventure up W. Hamdh didn't figure. I turned out my notes of those
three days a while ago. How we stuck! After you left us the Arab
Adventure got rather too black and heavy and the gaiety died out: while
the end of it left a nasty taste in my mouth. Hence partly my disgust
for my war personality! So please pardon a change of name.

Yours ever,

J.
H. Ross

Source:

DG 397-9

Checked:

mv/

Last revised:

19 February 2006

T. E. Lawrence chronology

﻿

1888 16 August: born
at Tremadoc, Wales

1896-1907: City of Oxford High School for Boys

1907-9: Jesus College, Oxford, B.A., 1st Class Hons, 1909

1910-14: Magdalen College, Oxford (Senior Demy), while working at the British
Museum's excavations at Carchemish

1915-16: Military Intelligence Dept, Cairo

1916-18: Liaison Officer with the Arab Revolt

1919: Attended the Paris Peace Conference

1919-22: wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom

1921-2: Adviser on Arab Affairs to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office

1922 August: Enlisted in the Ranks of the RAF

1923 January: discharged from the RAF

1923 March: enlisted in the Tank Corps

1923: translated a French novel, The Forest Giant

1924-6: prepared the subscribers' abridgement of Seven Pillars of Wisdom

1927-8: stationed at Karachi, then Miranshah

1927 March: Revolt in the Desert, an abridgement of Seven
Pillars, published

1928: completed The Mint, began translating Homer's Odyssey

1929-33: stationed at Plymouth

1931: started working on RAF boats

1932: his translation of the Odyssey published

1933-5: attached to MAEE, Felixstowe

1935 February: retired from the RAF

1935 19 May: died from injuries received in a motor-cycle crash on 13 May

1935 21 May: buried at Moreton, Dorset

﻿

This T. E. Lawrence Studies website is edited and maintained by
Jeremy Wilson. Its content draws on the research archive
formed through work on Lawrence of Arabia, The Authorised Biography
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